Earlier this week, a team of scientists and adventurers left Cape Town, South Africa, on a 440-foot icebreaker, trying to find the wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance in 10,000 feet of water in the Antarctic.
The team, called Expedition Endurance 22, will use two high-tech autonomous drones and two helicopters to find the Endurance, which sank 107 years ago and resulted in one of the most heroic rescue stories of all time. Shackleton’s adventures in managing to save the lives of all 27 members of his crew are taught to this day in leadership classes around the world.
The Endurance left Plymouth, England on Aug. 8, 2014, heading for the Antarctic at the end of the age of exploration, just at the start of the First World War that resulted in the shrinking of the British Empire. Shackleton’s idea was to cross the Antarctic continent and reach the South Pole.
But the Endurance, a three-masted, 144-foot long barquentine, was trapped in ice on the Weddell Sea in January, 1915. The crew stayed on the boat and camped on the ice until it was crushed and sank in November, 1915.
Shackleton then organized the crew on three lifeboats and in temperatures that dropped to 20 degrees below zero managed to get everyone to Elephant Island, the nearest piece of land; it provided some shelter, but it was totally uninhabited.
Realizing that no one was going to come looking for them, Shackleton and five others sailed a 22’ 6” lifeboat 800 miles to South Georgia Island, the nearest inhabited land (it had a whaling station) in an amazing feat of seamanship and navigation. Once they landed there, they realized they were on the wrong side of the island from the whaling station, and their lifeboat was in no shape to go on. Shackleton and two others then had to climb over snow-capped mountains and slide across glaciers before they reached the whaling station.
After several attempts, Shackleton returned to rescue all the remaining crew members on Elephant Island. Every man on the crew returned home alive. Shackleton was hailed as a hero when he returned home.
Now, the new expedition hopes to find the wreck of the Endurance using the drones. They have about a two-week weather window. If the ice prevents their ship from using the drones, they plan to use the helicopters to deposit some operators on an ice floe above the wreck of the Endurance, cut a three-foot-wide hole in the ice and deploy the drones from there. Read more;
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/climate/shackleton-endurance-shipwreck-search.html
